England transcendentalists.  One is often reminded of Novalis’ blue flower in such a poem as Emerson’s “Forerunners,” or Lowell’s “Footpath,” or Whittier’s “Vanishers,” or in Thoreau’s little parable about the horse, the hound, and the dove which he had long ago lost and is still seeking.  And again one is reminded of Tieck when Thoreau says:  “I had seen the red election birds brought from their recesses on my comrades’ strings and fancied that their plumage would assume stranger and more dazzling colours in proportion as I advanced farther into the darkness and solitude of the forest.”  Heinrich von Ofterdingen travels to Augsburg to visit his grandfather, conversing on the way with various shadowy persons, a miner, a hermit, an Eastern maiden named Zulma, who represent respectively, according to Boyesen, the poetry of nature, the poetry of history, and the spirit of the Orient.  At Augsburg he meets the poet Klingsohr (the personification, perhaps, of poetry in its full development).  With his daughter Matilda he falls in love, whose face is that same which he had beheld in his vision, encircled by the petals of the blue flower.  Then he has a dream in which he sees Matilda sink and disappear in the waters of a river.  Then he encounters her in a strange land and asks where the river is.  “Seest thou not its blue waves above us?” she answers.  “He looked up and the blue river was flowing softly over their heads.”  “This image of Death, and of the river being the sky in that other and eternal country” [28]—­does it not once more remind us of the well-known line in Channing’s “A Poet’s Hope”—­

  “If my bark sink, ’tis to another sea”;

or of Emerson’s “Two Rivers”: 

  “Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
    Repeats the music of the rain,
  But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
    Through thee, as thou through Concord plain”?

But transcendentalism is one thing and romanticism is another, and we may dismiss Novalis with a reminder of the fact that the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, once published at Concord, took for its motto a sentence from his “Bluethenstaub” (Flower-pollen):  “Philosophy can bake no bread, but she can procure for us God, freedom, and immortality.” [29]

Brentano and Von Arnim have had practically no influence in England.  Brentano’s most popular story was translated by T. W. Appell, under the title, “Honour, or the Story of the Brave Casper and the Fair Annerl:  With an Introduction and Biographical Notice” (London, 1847).  The same story was rendered into French in the Correspondant for 1859 ("Le Brave Kasperl et la Belle Annerl").  Three tales of Arnim were translated by Theophile Gautier, as “Contes Bizarres” (Paris, 1856).  Arnim’s best romance is “Die Kronenwaechter” (1817).  Scherer testifies that this “combined real knowledge of the Reformation period with graphic power”; and adds:  “It was Walter Scott’s great example which, in the second decade of this century, first made conscientious faithfulness and study of details the rule in historical novel-writing.”  Longfellow’s “German Poets and Poetry” (1845) includes nothing from Arnim or Brentano.  Nor did Thomas Roscoe’s “German Novelists” (four volumes), nor George Soane’s “Specimens of German Romance,” both of which appeared in 1826.